I’ve taken it fairly easy over at SXSW not stressing over attending all of the sessions but going to the ones I really wanted to see. Some have been good. Some have been very poor leaving you with nothing but a “Was that it?”, but Sunday was not one of those days. And we met some really great people.
Dual session with Jeff Jordan
The first of the great sessions was eBay to VC – Lessons from the trenches where Jenna Wortham talked to Jeff Jordan, the general partner of Andreesen Horowitz and previous head of eBay Marketplaces. The conversation between Jenna and Jeff was flowing and it was a really interesting session where Jeff talked through his experience over at PayPal, what he finds interesting in the current startup climate (e-commerce amongst other things) and now as a VC working with startups.
One aspect that I’ve learnt over here, and which he mentioned as well, is that over in the US there is less focus on having your monetisation aspect for your startup clear from the beginning. You should have early metrics but the focus is on number of users and being able to attract more users rather than necessarily how it will make money. Or how much by when. From what I understand it’s not the same case over in the UK.
Jeff also talked about what the best way to get in contact with his firm or other VCs are and as most of the articles I’ve read on this matter have stated, the answer was that getting an introduction is really the preferred way. That way you stand out from the crowd and are likely to get more attention.
Keynote by Amber Case on the future of interfaces
After the eBay to VC session I went over to see the keynote by Amber Case called Ambient Location and the Future of Interfaces. I’d been recommended to go see her and wasn’t the only one. The room was full and Amber lived up to the expectations. She started talking about her research into cyborg anthropology pulling up examples including:
From these examples Amber moved over to talk about invisible interfaces where persistent background data can help us develop invisible buttons that are triggered e.g. based on the location we’re at. She showed an example that she’s worked on mapattack.org and talked about Geoloqi, the company that she’s help start and finished off by saying:
The best kind of technology is invisible. It gets out of our way
Networking events
The final sessions of the day were network events beginning with the UK Demo day where companies from the UK were set up in a room and people moved between them to learn about the products. There were particularly two companies that were interesting to me and to byFlock – Shopcade and Acunu, the former because it’s playing in the e-commerce and social area which is related to one of our products and the latter as it’s about a data platform.
We also ran into Aziz Gilani who’d be on the panel the day before in the Exploring the top startup accelerator programmes and his colleague Scott, who’s based in Britain before heading over to Chinwag’s Great British Tea Party where we drank Pimms and had cakes in the sun and chatted to old and new friends.
The final event of the day was DeLux Balanced Team meet up which was a combination of talks and socialising. It was smaller and more intimate and great to round up some of the UX people that we’d gotten to know over the last few days before heading off to the first party for the evening.
